Margriet Naber Tchicai is a Dutch pianist who started out playing classical music and has always liked to dance. While studying “Music and Movement” in college (at the Conservatory of Rotterdam, Holland), she began to create her own music in different shades and rhythms. She strives to color the air, our living space, with interesting and healthy colors, to create music with a healthy balance of rhythm, melody and harmony.
It has taken her many years to break down imagined walls between musical genres, so she doesn’t want to put herself in any one particular box now.
She met her husband John Tchicai in Rotterdam at a workshop he taught and moved with him to California in 1991, where they started a jazz-latin-free-improv-rock group of seven musicians “John Tchicai & the Archetypes” which put out a record "Love Is Touching" (B&W 55) in '95. They began working together on compositions and played also in other formations (to name a few: quartet with Makaya Ntshoko and Peter Niklas Wilson, quartet with Vitold Rek and Gilbert Mathews).
Residing since 2002 in the South of France, Margriet leads her own trio with Sebastien Del Grande on drums and Alban Michaut on bass.
In 2004 she recorded 9 of her own compositions for solo piano and for band in a studio in Sacramento, CA, assisted by a crew of great musicians (Reggy Marks, flute & saxophone, Mark Oi, guitar, the late Erik Kleven, bass and Babatunde Lea, drums), which came out as CD "Colored Air" (TCH 001) in the summer of 2006.
Besides being a piano teacher, one of her favorite jobs was being an accompanist of modern dance-lessons at UC Davis. The arrangement used on her CD for “Largo Lapidarius” (the 1 composition on the CD which is not her own but her husband's) stems from that period.